


A Murder Of Crows

by Im_a_huge_fan_of_coffee



Category: Being Human (UK), The Almighty Johnsons
Genre: Afterlife, M/M, and kinda reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 13:55:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18661756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Im_a_huge_fan_of_coffee/pseuds/Im_a_huge_fan_of_coffee
Summary: GatheringFiki SpringFRE2019 Prompt 55: A murder of crows. It’s Mitchell, but not as we know him.________“Bragi.” The name sounds new off Mitchell’s tongue; the way he emphasises the vowels, making him softer, less dramatic. “What’s he like?”Anders counts all the years spent craving silence. It’s almost funny to think back on how at first he thought it was the best thing to ever happen to him, the way just a few well-placed words could open metaphorical doors and literal legs. Anders wanted, Anders got, and Anders paid the price.He can’t remember how long after he turned twenty-one that drinking sunny evenings away turned into drinking afternoons into oblivion; how long it was before late nights became later nights that morphed into long, white-washed mornings spent dry-heaving into empty bath tubs, crash after spectacular crash; and all so that the loudest thing wouldn’t be the voice in his head but the clashing of pills in his bloodstream.“Undeniable,” Anders says.“Now that I can understand.”





	A Murder Of Crows

Considering he’s lived with the god of poetry since the day he turned twenty-one, it’s kind of disappointing that Anders can’t come up with anything a little more profound than—

 

It’s so _white._

 

Not the white of expensive sheets, pristine hotel silk topped with pearl-skinned beauties all hungry for his cock; nor the crystalline white of blow, towering piles of purest powder all his for the taking. It’s not electric white like the stars that cloud his eyes in a Grey Goose haze, or the perfect white of a coconut beach, milky moonlight turning his sun-starved feet ghostly under the foaming shallows. It’s not even snow-white, frozen; no Nordic homecoming for Anders’ hitchhiker. Instead, he decides as he walks—

 

 _and walks, and walks; how the hell_ did _he get here, anyway?—_

 

that this white is the white of a landscape of absence, more the lack of any other colour at all than a shade in its own right. There’s no end to the vast plain beneath his feet, flat and desolate as the page of an empty book, scattered with treeless roots and cracks that run deep as his flaws.

 

He’d shield his eyes but it’s not exactly too bright. Now that he thinks about it, it’s not too anything. He doesn’t feel hot, cold, tired. Perhaps he’s beyond those so-very-human limitations now. There’s just a vague sense of curiosity as he looks from the dust-blown ripples on the ground to the towering white—

_bone white this time, picked clean; the white of frightened eyes before the light behind them goes out—_

 

cliffs that rise up at the edge of his vision.

 

Perhaps what’s most surprising of all is how unsurprising it is. Seeing that he seems to have retained his capability for rational thought, he reckons he should probably be shocked, scared – something more than indifferent, anyway. Even for someone with morals as dubious as Anders, the idea of death has always left him cold. Perhaps it’s the constant, schizophrenic reminder of his own mortality, but being confronted by it had a habit of turning him coward, happy to give others a nudge in the back and watch them fall under the wheels to save himself.

 

Frankly he’s surprised that he’s even lived as long as he has. If it hadn’t been for Bragi’s silver tongue licking around all the wounds that Anders tore open with his own, he’s pretty sure Dawn would have cut his balls off years ago and let him bleed out on the crappy carpet of JPR. Come to think of it, he isn’t even completely certain that he **is**  dead. Bragi is still with him, crackling away like radio static. Anders had always assumed—

 

_hoped—_

 

that kicking the bucket would at least have the benefit of some peace and fucking quiet.  

 

From what little he remembers, his was a bright and violent end. Even as the mourning sirens fade in Anders’ ears, his eyes opening wide and blue as cirrus skies and nothing like the miotic pinpricks he’s left behind staring blindly at the roof of the ambulance; even as he remembers the stilted backing track of someone, somewhere crying—

 

_maybe the fuckers will miss me, after all—_

 

The thing is, Anders can’t really say that he’d expected to find himself anywhere else. It’s not heaven, that’s for sure; but in life he hadn’t exactly been a saint.

 

Whatever it is, it’s certainly not all bad. It seems insane that he’d devoted so much time to finding Frigg so that they could all live forever. If he’s known it was going to be like this, this… **alright** , then maybe he wouldn’t have bothered. What is it that he thought he’d miss about existing anyway? Memories of a broken childhood? His job? Coke cut with laundry powder in sticky, reeking clubs? “I’ll-call-you’s” and an endless line of pretty, nameless—

 

_they tell him, but he makes a point of forgetting—_

 

faces attached to hot bodies that only serve to make him feel older and older every time he sends one packing out the door of his apartment?

 

Ty’s cold hands against his spine, the near-sickening hopeful glow of Axl’s youth?

 

Fucking **Mike** , for fuck’s sake?

 

No. If anything dying feels like a breaking chain, and the irony of it is that Anders feels himself breathe for the first time in years.

 

So he walks, and Bragi weaves tales around the back of his brain like a tightening net.

 

* * *

 

It’s the cries Anders notices first. The discordant, orphan sounds pierce the nothingness. A crow’s call, greedy and suspicious. There are hundreds of them, soaring black specks drawing predatory circles in the sky high above him. Even from this distance he gets an undeniable sense of their ruthless greed, how if he gave them a chance they’d be clawing for everything, any piece of Anders; a trophy eye, golden hair to line a nest.

 

One lands on the cracked earth in front of him and he watches it with interest; the two-foot hop, coal-black eyes that burn like hell pits. Do birds blink? – Anders wonders, nervous under scrutiny. He sidesteps and the crow joins in with the dance, oil-brilliant feathers gleaming in the white, white, white.

 

Bragi sings sonnets of Odin and Anders shakes his head and shooes the bird away with the back of his hand, sending it reeling and shrieking into the air along with the unwelcome commentary of the God within.

 

He’ll have no distractions now. The man—

 

_Can he call him that? Anders can sense the danger he holds inside, how the bones that cradle his chest hold a legacy of destruction—_

 

could be a bird himself; ethereal, other-worldly. Even from this distance Anders can admire—

 

 _and oh_ fuck, _how he admires—_

 

the noble line of his nose, his sculpted mouth. His limbs are long and lean, athletic even. A marbled statue in repose. There’s the way his head is angled just so – the grace of his calm brow, Anders’ tongue growing dry at the thought of what those languid lips might look wrapped around his—

 

_head, his head; that glorious head-_

 

Sharp cheekbones, lit with a Renaissance glow; crow-black curls slicked back, just long enough to greet his shoulders, just long enough to **pull.**  An angel’s head, Anders thinks with a laugh, knowing already that he must be anything but.

 

How long does it take? Five minutes? Five years? There’s no way to be sure. Either way, by the time Anders finally finds himself just feet away he thinks he might understand at last what it is to want something beyond the physical.

 

Sure; it’s physical _enough._ There’s the way the man stands with his shoulders rolled just slightly forward, all coiled energy. His muscles ripple under his skin like concealed feathers, like if he just tipped his weight through the balls of his feet he could take to the air himself. There’s the way his stomach tapers, that brilliant vee, the plane of it muscled but still softly curved, down and down—

 

_holy fuck—_

 

until his decency is just preserved by the long black robe flowing around his legs that leaves his chest gloriously bare. Anders can only imagine what those legs must look like, how it would feel to take one of those hidden ankles in his hands and kiss all the way up until—

 

_forgive me Father, for I have sinned—_

 

Maybe this is heaven after all. Anders has no time for to church. Had none, rather. He’s more inclined to giving head than giving confession, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t spent his whole life looking for somewhere to worship.

 

For just one touch of those long fingers he thinks he could happily spend eternity on his knees.

 

He wonders now if he’s been doing it wrong all along; turning over stones and holding them up to the light to inspect them when really, it’s the dark holes left behind in the dirt that have the answers.

 

* * *

 

 

Another halting step, and another. They’re so close now, nearly toe to toe. Bragi rattles on and on—

 

_always did have an eye for beauty—_

 

Smooth, gilded suggestions that Anders does his best to ignore. There are a million and one things he could say, but in the end it’s just—

 

“Nice skirt.”

 

“Thanks.” The beautiful mouth unleashes a beautiful smile, and Anders knees shake like he’s on the edge of an earth-shattering come-down. “It’s very… freeing. You should try it sometime.”

 

Anders looks down at his own clothes. Quite how it’s him that’s left feeling like the prick in his shiny shoes and snappy shirt—

 

 _Did he really go and die in_ this? _—_

 

Anders can’t say, but somehow the robe suits the stranger. There are feathers in the folds, and when he moves air sighs between them like the snatches of breath Anders hears off his own lips.

 

“What are you?” Anders asks eventually, unable to contain the blunt edge to his awe.

 

The man doesn’t answer immediately. He turns a slender wrist and a sharp-clawed crow appears from nowhere, coiling into the air with flurried wings dark as smoke. He leaves his hand facing upward, open like a question. Anders could reach about and take it, shake it, trace the lifeline across the sweep of his palm to where it scatters into a thousand pieces. His eyes never leave Anders’; brown eyes, soft and flecked with green like leaves on the surface of a summer stream. Then a sudden shift, the brown deepening to black and back again like an eclipse, and Anders takes one measured step back like it’s all part of a script he’s never seen.

 

“Oh.” This – this he didn’t see coming. Anders’ tongue sticks in his throat, dry as the sand beneath his feet. “You got a name?” He wins himself a gentle nod that looks like amusement and it makes him bold, letting his guard down just enough to let Bragi slide in. “Prince of Darkness? Big bad Vlad?”

 

“Big bad Vlad… I like that,” the man says. Narrow eyes, as if he keeps them half-closed on purpose, but kind; easy on Anders’ own. “You know no-one in all these years has come up with that yet?”

 

“I like to pride myself on originality.” Anders looks to Bragi for words, finally giving up his own as lost. He shrugs as he delivers them, praising himself internally for stealing a shard of his brother’s glacial cool.

 

“I’m known by a lot of names,” the figure adds quietly, as if a higher pitch might frighten Anders away. “Most of them are a little dramatic for my taste, you know? My parents called me John, but you can call me Mitchell.”

 

“Mitchell.” The name dissolves like sugar on Anders’ tongue, and in that moment the only thing he wants is for his mouth to be the colour of Mitchell’s mouth—

 

_somehow the colour of sunlight, the taste of dark honey, a promise of wicked things—_

 

Anders thinks of birdsong, fervent midnight prayers; and Bragi hums in a way Anders has never heard before, a god worshipping the godless as if the sound is poetry in itself: Mitchell.

 

* * *

 

“You’re a vampire,” Anders finally breaks his own stunned silence, not realising it’s been lapping around them like water. Somehow the word doesn’t sound as ridiculous as it should.

 

“Bingo.”

 

“But you… you’re… dangerous.” Way to state the fucking pointless. Even without the kaleidoscope eyes it’s obvious that Mitchell is nothing less than a thorned rose. His beauty goes hand in hand with his capacity for destruction; carnivore teeth behind a sweet façade, a wolf in bird’s clothing.

 

“Only when confronted with a karaoke machine,” Mitchell winks.

 

And he’s not at all what Anders expected, either. Anders doesn’t exactly do friends but there’s a part of him that thinks if Mitchell had been something else – somewhere else – that they might have been just that.

 

“So what’s with the birds, then?” Anders jerks his thumb to the tendrils of smoke still curling near Mitchell’s wrists. “Surely bats or something would be more appropriate?”

 

Mitchell laughs then, a glorious short span of breath. His eyelashes flutter against his face, their exquisite dark crescents leaving Anders with aching fingers. Would the pad of his thumb burn against the fragile shadows on his skin?

 

“I don’t know about that.” Mitchell turns his head to the sky, drawing Anders’ gaze to the striking calligraphy of the swirling black flock against the endless stretch of white. “Do you know what they call it? A collective of crows?”

 

He knows, but that isn’t the same thing as accepting it.

 

“I don’t want to have to break it to you,” Anders tells him slowly, “but murder isn’t really my scene.”

 

And that’s him speaking a truth for once. The only vicious thing about Anders is his pride, his sharp tongue the greatest and only real weapon in his arsenal. He knows nothing of brutality - not like this, not blood and bone and eternal damnation.

 

“And I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Mitchell smiles ruefully, “but if you’ve made it this far, then I think it’s safe to say that you no longer have a scene at all.”

 

So Anders **is**  dead, then. Why does it feel like a fever relief, like taking in air that he doesn’t know he’s been missing? There’s no sun, but Anders imagines shafts of it breaking through the clouds, a cinematic moment of revelation drenching everything in gold. Still, there’s an emptiness in his chest that comes from a lack of understanding. Anders is missing the final piece of the mosaic. For some reason, he keeps picturing Mitchell by night, dark curls far longer than they are now but still swept back; something about the shape of his name that conjures the smell of rain.

 

* * *

 

There are bones in the distance. Bare, stripped bones, raised in awkward salute to the sky like broken masts in Mitchell’s stark sea of despair. Too big to be crows, too many to be a coincidental projection of Anders’ subconscious. He wants to know, there’s no way Anders **can’t** ask. Is it always like this? Do they all want to know what Mitchell looks like with them on his lips, dripping down his chin like rubies? He looks to the ground for the inevitable indents where others would fall to their knees, just as Anders would, gladly – if only he didn’t want this to end.

 

If I’m not the first, he wonders, then is it possible that I can be the last?

 

“How many?”

 

“Far more than I’m proud of.” Mitchell doesn’t look sorry for what he is, but it’s a comfort to hear him say it like he means it, something close to remorse passing across his beautiful face.

 

“You feel bad about it?”

 

“Even darkness has a heart, Anders.”

 

Funny, that. Anders doesn’t ever recall giving him a name. “But some that you are?” He plucks at the thread of humanity left dangling from in Mitchell’s words. Maybe if Anders pulls hard enough, he will unravel.

 

“Some.”

 

Some. Anders looks at him then – really looks. What colour must Mitchell’s blood be to run underneath skin so pale? Anders can see the veins, striking bright blue and braided like the rivers of his Southern-starred childhood, borne by a heartless beat. Maybe their hue is just a useless relic, Anders' eyes following the lines up the smooth forearm to where they congregate in the delicate crook of an elbow; but perhaps it’s more than that; an eternal reminder that before he became the creature called Mitchell, he was once just a boy named John, pulsing with life and laughter.

 

“Didn’t know Death had an accent.”

 

And Mitchell does, strange and intoxicating, Dublin docks clinging to his ‘t’s’ and the way his vowels run off his lips in a trickle soft as Wicklow water.

 

“And I didn’t know you were going to be so mouthy this time.”

 

“This time?”

 

But even this isn’t the revelation it should be. Anders knows, he’s always known—

 

_his cold dead heart does, anyway; booming inside him like the sea in a cave, a furious you-and-me-you-and-me—_

 

Mitchell.

 

Vampire eyes fade to black again and for a fleeting moment Anders sees it all written there like secret scripture, the history of a fatal attraction. Mitchell’s storm-cloud mind contains a universe, theirs; fathoms deep and dark as vaults of the sea - and then gone again, as quickly as it came.

 

“How many times have we done this?”

 

And Mitchell smiles—

 

_crooked front teeth that Anders fights the urge to lick, perfect imperfections—_

 

“Every time,” he says simply, as if the curve of his words could be a chalice deep enough to hold all the answers.

 

* * *

 

“So what happens now?”

 

“I think you know.” Mitchell reaches out and traces a finger—

 

_feather-light—_

 

Through Anders’ hair, tucking a strand back into place. There’s something delicious and primal about the way Mitchell’s eyes graze up Anders’ neck, so darkly intent.

 

“Will it hurt?”

 

“If you want it to.”

 

“And after… will it be… the end?”

 

“A river joining the sea doesn’t stop being a river,” Mitchell says, moving in so close that his mouth brushes softly just below Anders’ ear. “It just becomes part of something bigger.”

 

Anders could swear Mitchell breathes him in, inhaling the scent of his skin—

 

_or the blood beneath it—_

 

And he’ll be damned if it’s not the hottest thing that’s ever happened to him. Anders can feel his eyes fluttering closed even though he’s never felt so awake, Mitchell’s attentions blowing over him like oxygen on sparking coals.

 

Does Mitchell sleep? Does he dream about this, about all the times they’ve met and all the times still to come?

 

“Have I changed?”

 

“Yes and no,” Mitchell whispers. Anders hasn’t anticipated the way _this_  would hurt, the sting of the one-sided memories. He doesn’t know what to do with it, all this feeling—

 

_after all, he’s lived his life trying to avoid feeling anything at all—_

 

so he clenches his fists and holds it in them instead. The crows soar indifferently, voyeurs from their empyrean kingdom. Mitchell’s shoulders lock first, the sudden tightening of tendon and flesh, before he cocks his head and looks at Anders—

 

 _not at but_ through—

 

almost as if he can see beyond that crown of gold.

 

“This—” His fingers are in Anders hair again and Bragi writhes in satisfaction. “This is new, though. Who’s your friend?”

 

“Not my friend,” Anders sighs. “He’s a God. Poetry, if you’d believe it.”

 

“A god,” Mitchell repeats, carefully tasting the words. “Suits you. I always said you were divine. I suppose by default that makes me a monster?”

 

“It makes you—”

 

_very, very fuckable—_

 

The truth of it is that Anders is probably not much better than Mitchell at all. Sometimes he lies awake, his only warmth the invisible clammy blanket of a half-assed high and unable to sleep, wondering if he’s really rotten all the way to the core. He knows addiction. He knows what it’s like to act out of desperation in trying to silence the hand that fate has thrown out. He scatters untruths like dandelion seed, so easy, so fast that sometimes even he can’t keep up with what’s real.

 

In the end, maybe pleasure from flesh is just pleasure from flesh. Anders doesn’t take blood but he takes damn near everything else he wants, sucking life just as voraciously as Mitchell. Perhaps they’re both just as guilty of leaving a trail of empty husks in their wake.

 

“Maybe,” he says in the end, “maybe it just makes you… human.”

 

When he really thinks about it, all the monsters he’s ever feared the most have worn the faces of men.

 

* * *

 

“Bragi.” The name sounds new off Mitchell’s tongue; the way he emphasises the vowels, making him softer, less dramatic. “What’s he like?”

 

Anders counts all the years spent craving silence. It’s almost funny to think back on how at first he thought it was the best thing to ever happen to him, the way just a few well-placed words could open metaphorical doors and literal legs. Anders wanted, Anders got, and Anders paid the price.

 

He can’t remember how long after he turned twenty-one that drinking sunny evenings away turned into drinking afternoons into oblivion; how long it was before late nights became later nights that morphed into long, white-washed mornings spent dry-heaving into empty bath tubs, crash after spectacular crash; and all so that the loudest thing wouldn’t be the voice in his head but the clashing of pills in his bloodstream.

 

“Undeniable,” Anders says.

 

“Now that I can understand.”

 

* * *

 

“Mitchell.” Anders forces himself to concentrate, tear a part of himself away from the heavenly cage of the vampire’s hands resting around the back of his neck. “Why?”

 

Maybe it’s a question he asks every time. Maybe Mitchell needs no elaboration, or maybe it’s just in the way Anders phrases it that leaves no ambiguity, but Mitchell just strokes his thumb against downy hair and smiles.

 

“Because they don’t love you like I love you.”

 

He’s the only one. Mitchell is the only one that knows him without Bragi, the man minus the god. Even Anders struggles to remember what he was like before that time—

 

_fuck only knows what he was like in the last life, or the one before that—_

 

But what does come to him of his adolescence reeks of worthlessness and suggests that had his fate been different he would have ended up just as broken one way or another. His brothers remember, Mikkel does anyway; but then they’ve all become so entangled with their own almighty possession that it doesn’t seem to count for as much as it might.

 

But Mitchell – he wants Anders for Anders, and Anders alone.

 

“You tell yourself lies, you know.” The way Mitchell reads his mind is infuriating more than unnerving. “You always were better than you thought.”

 

“Sounds like we deserve each other,” Anders says ruefully, but Mitchell just moves away, eyes fixed warily on his own like he might turn to smoke and disappear any second, like his presence is fleeting as the crows.

 

“One day,” he nods. A solemn whisper, a sigh, a river falling through reeds. “One day, I like to hope I will.”

 

* * *

“Kiss me.”

 

Mitchell’s smile grows like the dawn. “What’s the magic word?”

 

“Now,” Anders growls.

 

Anders has always thought that the first kiss is the best. All that breathless anticipation, the shiny new of it all, like slow-burning sunlight that singes and then catches fire all at once. Does it count as their first, if what they are is infinite? The way Anders’ lips tremble tells him it does, melting against Mitchell’s both fierce and delicate as the brush of wings all at once. There’s hunger, but not as Anders knows it. Anders winds his tongue around Mitchell’s for the span of a breath—

 

_A redundant breath, one that lasts seven ages—_

 

What is it that makes the touch of Mitchell’s mouth on his so painfully intimate? It’s not until Mitchell pulls away and Anders sees bloodless white enamel that he understands. He could have torn out Anders’ throat, made him bleed until he’s a pile of rust, but he chose instead to kiss.

 

The violence in his tenderness awakes something in them both.

 

“I want to know,” Anders tells him, defiant feet planted on the dirt.

 

“You don’t have to. You always have a choice—”

 

There’s chaos brewing beneath Anders’ skin, the grinding and crashing of the god within. He holds out his arms, palms up to the sky, waiting for his bones to become branches of white light—

 

_finish me, finish me—_

 

“Please.”

 

When Mitchell kneels in front of him, Anders thinks he might know absolution. It comes with obsidian eyes and knife-edge collarbones, long fingers and cold, cold skin. Mitchell contains it all in his hands that kiss hymns up Anders’ sides, lips wine-dark and wanting; in the avian sheen of his blue-black hair.

 

Anders sinks to the floor and moans so sweet, loud enough to drown out the lonely canticle that the birds send up—

 

_farewell, goodbye—_

 

“Wait.” Their foreheads kiss this time, Mitchell breathless with airless breaths, Bragi railing wild inside his cerebral cage. “You know they say that three’s a crowd.”

 

“I’ll deal with him,” Mitchell says.

 

When his teeth break Anders’ skin he gasps, not because of the hot, pulsing life pouring down the hollow of his throat; but because for once, for the first and final time, Bragi slots seamlessly into the back of Anders’ head.

 

Anders counts all the years he’s spent craving silence, and Mitchell gives it to him with the sigh of carnivore teeth in the soft flesh of his neck; gives it to him with the promise of long nights trading blood-tinged kisses. The change is electrifying, the kind of chemical fire that purifies as it burns.

 

What life was left in Anders resides on Mitchell’s skin—

 

_And – oh god, it suits him; how the hell can it suit him?—_

 

Bathed in blood, a second skin of copper and salt that slips between them like warm silk. It’s all Anders can do to bury his face in Mitchell’s neck, sucking and biting, giving up the most perfectly needy sounds as his nails scrabble against Mitchell’s broad back. His blood flows in the most satisfying way, and tears stream down his face in pure bliss. The hiss of air leaving his lungs doesn’t feel like a punchcard—

 

_nothing like he’s imagined—_

 

but a slowly-tightening vice, an iron band, a welcome embrace that feels like more like a homecoming than a full stop.

 

* * *

 

Considering he’d lived with the god of poetry since the day he turned twenty-one, its kind of amusing that Anders can’t come up with anything more profound than—

 

It’s so _white_.

 

Not the shrouded white that comes straight after pre-dawn grey, when the world hasn’t yet woken but the light graces you all the same; nor the white of bloodless skin, cold to the touch and paper-thin. It’s not the sharp white of canine teeth, poised to take their bloody communion, or even the pure white of heaven – whatever that entails.

 

Instead, Anders thinks, as he walks—

 

 _and walks, Mitchell’s feet falling step for step with his; how the hell did it come to_ this _, anyway?—_

 

that this white is the white of great waves, a noble swell that washes sins clean; salt-white, the kind that confronts and leaves the soul scrubbed and exposed at the surface. This white, purest, blinding white; the breathless white of foaming, windswept air that caps the darkening deeps where crows call and surge amongst the endless tide of love.

 


End file.
